[France24] After years of accusations that Islamabad was covertly backing the Taliban, Pakistan overtly hailed the fall of Kabul on Sunday. Experts say geostrategic concerns about its enemy India motivate Pakistan’s pro-Taliban stance — making it unlikely to change course, even amid fears that the militants’ control of Afghanistan accentuates the jihadist threat at home.Islamabad’s reaction to the Taliban’s victory was the opposite of the despair in Western capitals: Their triumph showed that Afghans had "broken the shackles of slavery", Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan asserted.
Khan’s special assistant Raoof Hasan framed the fall of Kabul — for many, a moment encapsulated by footage of hundreds of Afghans running alongside a departing US plane, desperately trying to flee — as a "virtually smooth shifting of power from the corrupt Afghan government to the Taliban".
Perhaps most tellingly, Pakistani Climate Minister Zartaj Gul Wazir singled out the country’s perennial antagonist India as the audience for her delight, in a subsequently deleted tweet: "India gets an appropriate gift for its Independence Day".